Big Data Product Watch 5/9/13: Usability and Accessibility

It's been a busy week for Big Data as vendors seek to make the technology more usable and accessible in the face of a skills shortage.

Talend Inc. on Tuesday announced version 5.3 of its open source integration platform, citing the product's ease of use for companies that don't have in-house Big Data skills such as Apache Hadoop and NoSQL expertise.

"It has been difficult to work with these technologies," said Fabrice Bonan, Talend co-founder and CTO, in a statement. "The general lack of skillsets required to manage these new technologies continues to be a significant barrier to mainstream adoption."

The company said Talend v5.3 lets developers generate 100 perent MapReduce code with user-friendly tools, adds a graphical mapper for complex math calculations and difficult algorithms, and fetures more NoSQL support with connections for Couchbase, CouchDB and Neo4j.

Fast on the heels of its release of the Impala 1.0 query engine for Hadoop, Cloudera Inc. announced its first Cloudera Developer Kit (CDK) with tools, APIs and accompanying documentation for its Hadoop distribution. Cloudera, too, addressed the Big Data skills shortage. "The process of building and managing Hadoop environments remains complicated and time-consuming for many developers without specialized training," the company said in an announcement. The company said its CDK, available on GitHub, "removes barriers to entry and makes [the Cloudera Hadoop distribution] easier and faster to use, empowering developers to leverage the power of Hadoop, helping organizations unlock the value of their data for actionable insights and competitive advantage."

The company said the first module in its CDK, the data module, includes APIs that simplify using datasets in Hadoop file systems, including the Hadoop Distributed File System and the local file system.

Geographic information systems vendor Esri on Tuesay announced its GIS Tools for Hadoop toolkit, which the company said "removes the obstacles of building map applications for developers to truly capitalize on geoenabling Big Data within Hadoop." Esri continued, "Developers now will be able to answer the where questions in their large data stores."

The company said the kit, available on GitHub, includes sample tools and templates that show the functionality of spatial Hadoop querying using Hive, the Hadoop ad hoc querying module. It also includes a Geometry Library to simplify the development of Hadoop spatial applications.